Chapter Text
For almost as long as she could remember, Eva Stratt had been locked in a prison cell. Intellectually, she knew that the prison was housed on an island off the coast of France. It supposedly had a temperate climate with the sweet saltiness of the sea thick in the air. When the judge sentenced her, he’d laughed and told her that it would be a well-earned vacation to spend the rest of her existence on an island paradise.
Not that she’d seen anything apart from the four blank walls of her cell for the last 20 years.
After the world found her guilty of over 100 crimes—several of them considered to be crimes against humanity—she was sentenced to a life of solitary confinement. She would never see the sea again or hear the soft sound of the waves meeting the sand, despite how close her cell was to the shore. She had neither art nor music.
The guards were ordered not to speak to her. Each day she thanked her jailers as they slid trays of food through the slot in her door. Every once and a while, she’d hear an awkward ‘You’re welcome’ muttered back to her, but soon she after, she noticed that those guards would be replaced by others.
She didn’t have much.
The list was limited. She was thankful that the prison she was sentenced to was modelled after the reformer jails of Scandinavia. There was a prison-issued wooden bed and a small pine writing desk with a comfortable chair. There was even a small bookshelf, though she was only allowed to keep three books at a time per the guidelines. She had a few uniforms—gray and non-descript in nature—that she kept in a cupboard next to the bed. There was even a private area, offset from the main living space with a small sink, a toilet and a shower.
Over the years, she’d gained approval to keep a small number of personal items, most of them sent to her by former members of the Project Hail Mary team, who recognized that she’d taken the fall for all of them. She had a small collection of wool socks that had been hand knit by one of the biochemists, a large down comforter from the former deputy head of the ESA, and a big red cardigan that Leclerc had sent her with a long apology note.
It had been a long 20 years. Though she wasn’t allowed visitors, she’d learned from books how to speak six additional languages, Hausa, Malay, Tamil, Romanian, Tamazight, and Esperanto—though she wasn’t totally sure if Esperanto counted. She spent one hour every day doing the same vigorous exercise routine that she’d been doing since university. Then she sat down and spent the rest of the day responding to letters, writing for fun, and reading for pleasure.
Sometimes, on rare occasions, she let her mind wander to the life she had before all this.
She had been someone with power.
Someone respected.
Someone feared.
The world had been hers to do what she wanted with it, and she’d molded it to the best of her ability to be a world that would resilient—a world that would have a chance of surviving.
Yet none of it mattered in the end, and she knew that it would be that way as she did it.
When the world needed a leader, she’d stepped up, and when they’d needed a scapegoat, she’d laid her neck out on the guillotine.
She didn’t miss the power. She didn’t miss the thrills of telling the world’s leaders to fuck off. She didn’t miss the rush that a new scientific discovery caused in the early days of astrophage research.
The only thing she missed was something she could never get back. She had shot him into space at 93% of the speed of light against his will, and by her calculations, he would be dead and rotten for nearly 12 years now.
That’s why she didn’t like to think about the before times. It was much more comfortable to focus on the four walls that held her world now. That way she could pretend that she had no regrets, that she really was the cartoonish villain that the papers made her out to be.
She pushed those thoughts out of her mind and returned her focus to her Tamazight textbook. Since she had no one to practice with, she practiced reading out loud a poem that was included in the book to work on her pronunciation.
She realized bitterly after a few lines that it wasn’t a poem after all. It was actually a song that had been translated from its original English into Tamazight.
The words to “Amazing Grace” felt leaden on her tongue as she spoke them aloud.
A new, unfamiliar sound filled the room a few days later. The sound of metal scraping against metal, and a jangling noise that she knew she recognized from the before times.
It was only when the door to her cell opened that+++ she realized that the noise had been the sound of keys.
She sat in absolute stunned silence, her senses overloaded with the visual stimuli that came from a living, breathing person entering her space. She daren’t say anything, afraid that her voice would betray the hope that had begun to blossom in her belly at this unexpected turn.
Instead, she soaked in as much information as she could. The guard who opened the door was a young man, probably less than 25 years old. He would have been a baby when the Petrova Line was discovered. He recognized him as a guard from the pattern on his sleeves—one she’d seen thousands of times when the guards slid her new reading materials, clean sheets and clothing, and her daily rations.
He stepped aside to let a woman step into the room. She was tall and thin, her hair tied into dozens of tight braids that framed a pretty face with a severe expression—a look that Stratt recognized from her own time in power. She was younger than Stratt was by perhaps 15 years, her skin still mostly unwrinkled and her eyes still kind.
Though they had never met, almost immediately, Stratt recognized her as the UN Secretary General Zainab Dauda. She’d been born in northern Nigeria but shipped off to boarding school in France when she was old enough to learn to read. After that she attended Oxford and had become a diplomat. Her passion for equalize access to food during the astrophage crisis had led her to become the leader of the FAO and later the first female Secretary General.
Despite not being allowed to read the news, Stratt had read the young woman’s biography a year earlier, when the book appeared on the list of approved texts for her to request.
“Eva Stratt, Director of the Hail Mary Project?” The woman’s voice was stern.
Stratt stood, her bones creaking as she did. “Yes, I’m Eva Stratt. And you are the Secretary General of the United Nations Zainab Dauda.”
“I see my reputation precedes me.” Stratt could tell that she’d unnerved the other woman by knowing her name without an introduction, but the temporary confusion washed off her face and was replaced by political plasticity. She waved a hand at the desk chair and asked, “May I sit?”
“Please,” Eva said, gesturing at the chair. Once the politician sat down, Stratt lowered herself down on to the bed across from the seat. She wished desperately that there was a second chair in the room, as the sagging of the mattress beneath her made her feel smaller, weaker than she liked to be perceived.
“You may leave us,” Dauda commanded the guard.
The man seemed flustered by the unexpected command, “Ma’am, the prisoner is highly dangerous. You shouldn’t be left alone with—”
“That was an order,” she repeated. “You do not have the security clearance for this discussion, leave.”
The guard made a face as if to say ‘and she has the security clearance?’ but was smart enough to leave without making a fuss. Stratt heard some grumbling from the other side of the door and the scraping of keys against metal as the guard locked them in the cell together.
“You’re not afraid to be alone with a hardened criminal?” It felt good to be talking to someone real again after all these years.
“You and I both know that you are not a criminal.” She said it like it was a fact, one that Stratt herself wasn’t always sure she believed. For years she’d been certain that she’d do anything to save the world, even going so far as to willingly sacrifice her own freedom, but when she’d be forced to put Grace on that rocket ship… She tried to push the thought out of her mind, mostly successfully. Dauda continued, “You know it was hard to find you.”
“Really?” That piqued her interest. It was part of her public sentencing, the location of her prison. She remembers the judge’s laugh as he doled out his justice, though she supposed after 20 years, anything—and anyone—can disappear.
“They sealed your court files after the sentencing for fear of retaliation or threats on your life. I had just finished my master’s program at the time, and I remember the outrage that your sentencing wasn’t public. People were mad. People hated you.” Once again, she stated it factually.
“And I’m sure they still do. Many of them still should,” Stratt responded with her own facts.
“I’m not here to relitigate the past.”
Stratt folded her arms. “Then why are you here?”
Dauda reached into her medium size bag and pulled out a small cellophane folder holding some printed sheets. She removed the plastic and handed the papers to Stratt. “I’m here about this.”
She looked through the packet. The first few pages were a mess of numbers and numerical outputs that she wasn’t familiar with immediately. She flipped to the back to find a brief written report on the novel findings from the European VLBI Network. A new radio frequency had been detected at the outer edges of the solar system seven days and 16 hours before the time when Dauda showed up at her door.
She flipped back to the front sheets and the pattern emerged. Between the static and other radio anomalies the telescopes had picked up, she saw a series of notes—familiar chords—written repeatedly in the scan.
Here Comes the Sun.
“The Beatles,” she breathed, as if speaking too loud would break the magic of the moment and bring her back to reality. They’d programed the autonomous ships to broadcast the chorus of the song so that Earth’s sensors would be ready for their arrival and ready to work. “Project Hail Mary worked.”
The younger woman nodded. “It would appear so.”
The feeling she felt was something she could never even venture to describe. She’d imagined this moment hundreds—if not thousands—of times. While working with the team on the ship, while training the astronauts, while watching the ship blast off, while discussing her options with her attorneys as they prepared for her trial, while sitting and decaying forgotten in this island jail.
She’d imagined that she’d be heralded a hero in the press or maybe vilified by the media for the drastic measures she’d taken to get them to this point. She thought maybe she’d burst into tears or fall to her knees in prayer or pass out from shock. Maybe she would laugh, a sense of relief washing over her that all she did was worth it. Or possibly she would feel vindicated, angry even, for the way the world treated her when she was the reason any of this had come together at all.
She felt none of that in the end, all the possible iterations ranging from jubilation to fury replaced with a dull, aching emptiness that had been growing in her chest since the adrenaline of launch day wore off.
She wasn’t sure what to say, afraid the emptiness in her chest would gobble her up, so she sat and waited for the Secretary General to continue.
After what felt like forever, the younger woman asked, “Aren’t you wondering why I came to tell you this?”
Stratt, older and even more pragmatic than before, responded simply, “Yes, but I figured you would tell me why.”
She could tell that the other woman found her aggravating, but in all honesty, Stratt was simply just enjoying having someone to talk to. She was in no rush to move the conversation along.
Dauda pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a huff of air. “We,” she didn’t specify who the ‘we’ was, but Stratt could assume that she had been designated by the other world leaders to deliver the news on behalf of some or all of the rest of the world, “We would like to ask you to return to the helm of the Project Hail Mary commission.”
Stratt felt like the floor had fallen out from beneath her.
“Certainly, there is someone more qualified than me.” Dauda frowned slightly, and Stratt added, “And certainly someone who has been allowed to keep up with the news for the last 20 years would be more qualified than me.”
The Secretary General shifted slightly in her chair, causing the metal to scrape loudly across the floor. “You knew who I was without reading the news, and I’ve seen your library logs. You’ve read every biography of the world’s highest-powered politicians, every astrophysics journal, every pop science book. You might be banned from ‘news’ but that didn’t stop you from keeping up. Not to mention that the Beatles won’t get her for almost a full year according to our estimations.”
Stratt couldn’t help but feel pleased that her efforts to stay up-to-date on the world weren’t going without notice.
But it still didn’t quite track with what she knew of the world.
A world that was bitter, mean and hungry.
A world that wanted to have someone to blame.
She nodded before prompting, “Sure, but my first point still stands.”
The frown on Dauda’s face deepened as if what she said was physically painful. “You have many allies, Ms. Stratt. Many of them remain the most influential scientists on the planet. It seems that your allies are using this moment to force our hand.”
“Force your hand,” she echoed, not quite understanding.
Dauda pinched her nose again—something that was clearly a bad habit of hers—and let out a short huff. “They are refusing to work on the project unless you are granted clemency and are allowed to serve as director of the mission again. And lucky for you, the world doesn’t have time ”
That surprised Stratt.
Of course, she knew some of her former colleagues still supported her—she had the red cardigan wrapped around her and her small collection of wool socks to reminder her of that—but she didn’t realize that there would be a large enough contingent to make any real impact.
At first, almost everyone on the Project Hail Mary team had supported her, rallying to her defense as the magistrates had dragged her before the ECHR. They’d written letters, submitted evidence, done TV and magazine interviews—all attesting to her strong character and drive to save the world. In the early days, the courtroom was jam packed with scientists and generals and production plant managers.
But then they had added the Murder of Ryland Grace to her list of charges.
In the discovery process, the State’s attorneys had found evidence that she’d ordered him sedated and sent against his will. There was video evidence of her calling him a coward as the drugs worked their way through his system.
After that, less and less of her colleagues spoke in her defense, and by the time she was sentenced, the courtroom was nearly empty apart from her, her legal counsel and reporters from every country in the world. She’d had no supporters, no friends, no one.
She received a letter right after she was locked in her cell from one of the senior scientists that had read, I hope you rot for what you did to Grace. He was your friend. He was the best of us.
And Stratt had agreed. After all these years and thousands of pieces of mail, she’d kept that letter, folded up and hidden in the small cupboard beside the bed. It was a reminder of what she was.
A woman deserving of punishment.
A woman who would do anything to achieve her goals.
“I understand the position you’re in,” Stratt said, finally gathering her thoughts.
“The world’s leaders, they’re still afraid of you. Many of them were junior politicians when Project Hail Mary was getting started and they’ve built this career in a political landscape shrouded in your influence.” From reading her biography, Stratt knew that the Secretary General was one of those politicians—raised in the optimism of the mid-21st century until the Petrova Line’s discovery brought reality crashing down around them. “The Security Council members don’t want to admit it, but your opinion still holds immense power. The world needs someone who can lead. Someone who isn’t afraid to be cruel.”
Eva Stratt was many things, but she’d never considered herself to be cruel.
But had she not been cruel? She tried to push the thought out of her mind, but instead her ponderance on cruelty was replaced by visions of Grace floating instead to the surface of her mind. She squeezed her eyes shut, repeating the mantra that kept her sane all these years in prison.
Saving the world is worth every cost.
She didn’t even realize that her lips were moving as she repeated the phrase over and over again until Dauda asked, “Are you ok, Ms Stratt?”
She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. “Yes, sorry.” She tried to ignore the dread growing in the pit of her stomach. The feeling that she was being offered something that she could never, ever deserve. “I noticed that you didn’t say that the world needs someone who can take the blame again, but that’s part of it, too.”
The Secretary General looked genuinely sheepish for a moment, like she was caught in a lie. “I am approved to offer you clemency and continued immunity to further prosecution, if it works.”
If it works.
That was the catch.
But Stratt was certain that if Yao, Ilyukhina and Grace sent back the Beatles that they had found the cure to what sickened their dying planet.
“I see,” she paused, weighing her options. She desperately wanted to get out of this room and get back in the world again. She could already feel herself becoming more alive, her blood bringing the color back into her cheeks, her mind slightly sharper than before. But she still didn’t think she was the right person to lead the mission. “What if I don’t want to come back?”
Dauda frowned. “You want me to believe that woman, who once was the most powerful person alive and now lives in a single 15 m2 room wouldn’t do anything to have that kind of power again?” The younger woman leaned forward, her face only a few inches from Stratt’s. “You and I are like sharks that tasted human flesh. Once we smell blood in the water, we would do anything to get at it. You could never convince me that an old hag like you isn’t frothing at the mouth for a chance a power.”
Stratt didn’t respond since there was nothing to say.
The moment drew long and thick with unspoken tension until Dauda leaned back in her chair, causing the metal to creak under her weight. She smiled slightly as if she had figured out what trick Stratt was playing.
“Fine,” the other woman said, folding her hands in her lap. “If you are able to save Earth, I’m also authorized to give you anything you want.”
“Anything I want?” Stratt exhaled the words all at once.
The only problem was the one thing she wanted was not possible for her to get.
Dauda didn’t know that though. The world saw Stratt as remorseless, power drunk and authoritative, but after years of isolation, she’d become comfortable with her regrets, acknowledging them like old friends.
“Yes, anything you want—as long as it’s possible of course. We could make you a billionaire, build you a mansion, rename a whole country for you. The world will be celebrating you as a hero if you’re able to brighten the sun.”
Stratt smiled weakly, knowing this was a second chance she could never deserve, but knowing that she would take it. Just as she had known that she would accept the position the first time it was offered to her, she knew she would accept again. Her body and her mind would let her do nothing else, even as her conscience protested.
She closed her eyes, the words falling gracelessly from her lips. “Yes, I will rejoin Project Hail Mary.”
“I’m glad we reached an agreement,” Dauda responded. “The UN will arrange for your to be released in three days time. We look forward to working with you again.” When Stratt opened her eyes, she saw the Secretary General’s hand outstretched for a handshake.
She didn’t take it. Human touch felt too intimate after 20 years of solitude.
The other woman frowned and took back the papers proving that the Beatles were on their way as she stood up. Slipping the papers back into her bag, Dauda made her way to the door, where she knocked three times in a distinctive pattern that Stratt didn’t recognize. A moment later, the sound of metal keys scraping against the rusted and neglected lock filled the air. Stratt couldn’t help but look as the door swung open.
Dauda paused at the door, her hand hesitating on the door jamb before she crossed the threshold. “Ms. Stratt, one last thing, if I may.”
Eva nodded, signaling for the other woman to continue.
“The world is a lot different now. More than I think you understand.” There was a new sadness in her voice as if the profound sense of loss the astrophage siege had caused was suddenly too much to bear. “I just—” the words caught in her throat. “We need this to work.”
Stratt said the only thing that she could. “It will work.”
Dauda walked out the door, and the guard quickly shut the door behind her, the sound of it echoing off the cold interior of her cell.